Megalopolis

On The Fritz

Megalopolis
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
USA 2024
American Zoetrope
UK cinema release print

“Head and hands need a mediator.
The mediator between head and hands must be the heart.”
Metropolis, 1927

So the day before I saw Megalopolis, I watched a review by one of my favourite movie critics. 

Now, I find Francis Ford Coppola a bit hit and miss but he’s always very interesting and, one of the reasons I wanted to see this one was because he’d been trying to get this film made since he was talking about it on the set of Apocalypse Now in the 1970s. After many cast changes and false starts he finally raised the $120 million dollar budget out of his own pocket (to ensure the lack of studio interference), selling one of his own vineyards in the process. However, when I watched this one review of the film by the critic I have a lot of time for, it was a ten minute rant about how it’s possibly the worst movie he’s ever seen (someone’s clearly not seen Harlem Nights then!), for various reasons. So I kinda regretted that I'd bought the ticket to see it at Leicester Square but, I was in London to attend a book signing anyway and so I went through with it and, you know what... it wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen.

The film is a fable set in the late 21st Century where Adam Driver’s character Cesar Catilina, who has the power to freeze time whenever he wants, is one of the chief architects and power players in the royalty that is New Rome, taken over from New York (so SPQR USA, I guess). He’s also invented a new and magical building material called Megalon (not the same Megalon who is an enemy of Godzilla in a 1973 movie, reviewed here). And the whole film is a power struggle between the various members of the extended family who play Gods to this new Roman Empire... there’s Nathalie Emmanuel as latest love interest to Cesar, Julia Cicero. And there’s Giancarlo Esposito (Mayor Cicero), Shia LaBeouf (troublemaker Clodio Pulcher), Aubrey Plaza (as ambitious, backstabbing TV presenter Wow Platinum), Jon Voight (Hamilton Crassus III), Laurence Fishburne (as Cesar’s driver and wing man Fundi Romaine) and even Dustin Hoffman as a behind-the-scenes fix it man.

And I think the reason the film has been said to have no story is probably due to the fact that it’s such a fairly simple story that everyone is expecting more from it, perhaps. But there is one. And it’s been called unwatchable by many, it would seem... but no it isn’t. Unlike the reviewer I saw, I didn’t find it incredibly dull and it didn’t really feel longer than its two hours and eighteen minutes (although, it kinda felt like there may have been some cuts which could have expended certain scenes, like the final fate of Clodio).

And, yes, pretty much all the actors are giving absolutely scenery chewing, over the top performances which some may later come to regret and which seem stagey and contrived but... I’ve been thinking about this... I suspect a lot of this may have been exactly what Coppola was going for here.

To explain, the one review I saw didn’t mention a very specific film which, it turns out, lots of other people have mentioned in connection to this film... I just didn’t know about it. So I was about two thirds of the way through Megalopolis before I realised that this is a film very much informed by the 1927 Fritz Lang silent movie, Metropolis (reviewed here). And I wish I’d figured that out sooner because, yes, the dialogue is extremely bad and so much nonsense in this film, for the most part but, if you scratch that off the surface and look at it as a silent movie, treating the dialogue as unnecessary chatter, then you do have a film which starts to resemble those lofty heights that Lang committed to celluloid at the end of the silent era.

Yes, it’s a somewhat bloated corpse of a movie but, perhaps that’s how the younger generation may perceive Metropolis as being if they were presented with it as a brand new film nowadays. And, look, I’m not denying that there are a lot of problems and unfortunate artistic dead end choices in this movie but, I think it’s not something you should dismiss so lightly either... I think it’s definitely worth a look and my gut instinct is telling me that 30 to 50 years from now, if Coppola is still remembered, then this film may come under a certain re-appraisal and people might start taking it a little more seriously than, well, than it’s even possible to do right now.

Given that the film is quite all over the place tonally in some sequences, I have to also give a round of applause to composer Osvaldo Golijov, who manages to shift his musical palette through a number of different styles and really does help bring together the movie as a whole, I think.

One last thing about Megalopolis, before I move on and forget about this one for a while... the reviewer who I watched before I saw the film brought up the movie Caligula (reviewed by me here) and said that it’s a much more interesting way of doing things than what Coppola has done here. I don’t think Coppola was necessarily influenced by that film but, I think it was a good call to invoke it because there were many stretches of the movie, especially at the start, which do call to mind that particular film (actually, if Megalopolis had more female nudity, I would have thought a lot more of it, I suspect). 

It is then, as far as I'm concerned, a never dull but perhaps less substantial take on a kind of melding between the sensibilities of Metropolis and Caligula (another film people are citing in relation is The Fountainhead but, I’ve never seen it so can’t comment either way). And although it is not going to make many people who see it happy, I’m really glad I did take the opportunity to go to the screening and could certainly be tempted back to see it again in ten years or so. It’s not the aesthetic disaster that many reviews may lead you to believe but, similarly, I think this will fail abysmally at the box office and I kinda feel for Coppola (who recently lost his wife during post production). I hope this noble dinosaur of cinema can remain untouched by the possible public lambasting this film may well receive. An interesting failure then but, one which may well be considered a success by many in later years, I feel.

Fury

Cantankerous

Fury
2014  UK/China/USA
Directed by David Ayer
UK cinema release print.

Fury is the name of a tank.

This film follows the war time exploits of that tank and it’s crew, commanded by Brad Pitt as Don Collier, during the last year of the Second World War.

As such, it hasn’t got a standard story, or traditional plot line. It’s a very basic, drive your tank here, point it over there and shoot but, of course, that’s a very simple minded appreciation of what we have here which is a very tight and gripping war movie, trying very hard to be as authentic as it can be to what it was like to be in one of those tanks at that point in time. War didn’t have stories as we know them but it also had thousands of stories every day, depending on your view of the term. So in some ways, I guess this does have a story of sorts... the story which is the arc of the personal histories of the men who are driving the tank.

Now with a bunch of actors like Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña and Jon Bernthal... who are all beyond excellent in this and stuck in close proximity in the claustrophobia inducing, cramped conditions of one of these things... you’d expect this to be a character piece and, certainly, you do get a measure of the men these actors are bringing to life in front of you. However, it’s interesting in that it’s not a character piece in terms of the history of any of the men. There are occasional little hints or flourishes which allow you to make shrewd guesses about the back story of some of the main characters but, ultimately, you are in the same position as someone who would be taking Brad Pitt’s advice to his new gunner, Logan Lerman, for the first time... don’t get too close to anyone. So this film is very much a study of the way that men who are none too palatable, in some cases, bond through war and have become a crack fighting team in spite of their differences.

And I have to say the film works really well in this.

For instance, when you are first introduced, pre-credits, to the majority of the crew, they don’t exactly seem to be a well oiled machine in terms of their ability to gel as a team. There are some points in the film where people take a swipe at each other and generally don’t get on with their fellow men, thrust into the mix inside a ticking time bomb of metal carnage... but this film, after deliberately setting up that inconsistency with the way the characters act and react to each other, shows that beneath the surface of these men, there is an overreaching spirit to complete their mission for their country or go down fighting. It’s in this way that the true character of the people involved comes out. The hooligan of the group, who often starts trouble, has a telling scene in which he tells the new recruit that he believes him to be a good man. Everyone has a heart, it seems. They just don’t let it show.

Pitt’s commander is very much a man who is holding together a unit while trying to hold himself together at the same time. There are more than hints that he’s already suffering from some kind of combat fatigue but, unlike a similar condition displayed by Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, he keeps it in check with a minimum of fuss and Pitt’s performance here is such that it becomes very easy to see the sympathetic and extremely empathic man underneath the fierce veneer... and it is a very fierce and challenging veneer as he forces his new recruit, quite physically, into shooting a captured nazi, for example.

Logan Lerman plays Norman Ellison, the new boy, and he also has his own journey/story... as he goes from pacificistic Christian to out and out nazi killer over the course of the film... a journey that Brad Pitt facilitates due to the necessity of having to survive in this kind of conflict. There’s a certain irony to Norman’s attitude by the end of the film when he comes face to face with a nazi searching for survivors but, since I don’t want to spoil the ending of the movie for you, I’ll hold off pointing it out in this review and just urge you to go see it and think about it for yourself.

I’ve not seen any other movies by writer/director David Ayer but he does a fine job here and makes some very interesting, almost puzzling choices in the way he shoots certain kinds of scenes. Specifically the battle scenes.

He goes with hand held camera reacting to things, as you might expect for a modern film about conflict, but he tempers that with absolute static shots of whats going on, in terms of camera movement, every two or three shots in the combat sections. It’s actually curious but quite grounding... like a series of mini establishing shots cut into the battle. The editing is quite pacey but it’s not too fast like a fair number of modern action movies and I think it might be due to the static nature of some of those shots which helps the audience not lose sight of the geography of the action a lot of the time. You really feel those fraught and suspenseful battle scenes too so it’s not something which lessens the emotional pull and drain you get when this kind of stuff is going on.

The other really phenomenal thing about this movie is the score by Steven Price. It’s interesting because it’s quite unlike a traditional war score, bringing a very contemporary style of beats and electronica into the mix. At the same time, possibly due to the mixing but probably due to the spotting, because it does have a chance to shine within the mix, it feels very appropriately scored throughout and you never really question the decisions made with the make up of the music... so it’s another good one from him. I have to say, the CD has gone straight to the top of my Christmas list this year.

Not much else to say on this one. The ending has divided some people and I think the irony of it at a certain point is a bit much to swallow, but overall I think it caps things off quite nicely and I’m not going to be too critical of that because, one of the things I know about trying to get by in a chaotic world, is you don’t always make decisions that make sense. It works well enough and, overall, Fury is a movie which pulls no punches and reminds you of the heroes who died for their countries during conflicts ike these. A good, solid war movie if that’s the kind of thing that floats your DUKW or tracks your tank. Take a look at this one on a big screen if you get a chance.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Bay For Night!

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (aka Transformers 3D) US 2011

Directed by Michael Bay

Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: Yeah, there’s going to be some big, twisty, Rubik cube-like spoilerage on this one... but, frankly, how spoilery can it get on a movie like this?

Okay, I had my reservations when I took my long suffering cinema companion Orange Monkey to see the new Transformers movie. This took on more of an edge when I got in the car and she drove me down to my local as I was soon made aware that she hadn’t seen the first two movies in the series. Ignoring my own initial concerns as to why you would want to see the third movie in a series first (okay, so I like to watch things in order, no big deal) I then gave her a brief rundown of my personal experiences of the first two Transformer movies which I will repeat and elaborate on here so anyone reading can get a handle on where I’m coming from on my review of the third one and which goes a little something like this...

I was dragged kicking and screaming to the cinema to see the first Transformers movie back in 2007. I really did not want to go and the toys were something I’d missed out on as they arrived just past the point where I had stopped playing with kiddie toys (don’t worry, I’m happy to play with them now... I just don’t have any Transformers) and I’d not bothered with the old cartoon show or the comics back in the 80s and... well I just didn’t get it and wasn’t interested okay? But then an odd thing happened... a friend of mine, who is a mother of two, wanted to go and see it because she remembered buying the toys for her boys when they were kids. She didn’t get out to the movies much and... well I’m never one to intentionally disappoint the ladies (unless dancing or weddings are involved). And so we went to see it...

I was blown away by that first one big time.

It was a really great movie in all the right ways a summer blockbuster should be (for once) and everything just seemed to work on it. You had some cool visual effects, which are always the last thing on my mind but they were quite visually striking in that first one. Then you had the amazing opening sequences of total balls-to-the-wall, 21st Century cinema, state of the art action flick Bayhem... and then something really strange happened because the "other" storyline, which was set up to run simultaneously with the action heavy sequences, was an absolute throwback, but done really well, to those old mid-80s family movies which I remember living through when I was a teenager. The sequences with Shia LaBeouf and his Transformer pals were written, performed and shot with all the sensibilities of those much loved romps like Back To The Future and Gremlins. So already we had that strange juxtaposition going on.

And where it really worked was where director Bay pushed those storylines together and merged them for the final act... it was incredible that he managed to pull off that massive juggling act without the two different genre-types cancelling each other out. It was entertaining as hell and it had, from composer Steve Jablonsky, one of the most well crafted and best movie scores of the entire decade. The original score release, which is now quite hard to find as it was deleted very quickly (for some bizarre reason) was not out of my player for very long for a couple of years.

But then Bay ruined it with a sequel... Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen which, frankly, was one of the worst movies I’ve ever had to sit through in my life. I was so looking forward to it on the strength of the first film but instead I had to bite back on my disappointment that Bay had dropped the ball quite this badly and just find a way of moving on. Surprisingly though, even Jablonsky’s follow up score was not a patch on his first one... what could have been the second movie’s one saving grace felt kind of thrown away and lazy and I think it would be true to say that the best musical moments of the second movie were the parts which were just tracked in from the first.

And so I had really mixed feeling when I went to see the third... especially now I’d found out that my friend Orange Monkey had not realised fully what she was letting herself in for when she’d accepted my invitation to see Michael Bay blow things up in 3D. Still, not to worry... I told her that whatever happened, it was impossible to make a movie worse than the second one... so we armed ourselves with chocolate raisins and Cadbury’s mini-eggs and settled down to the watch the film.

Okay, now I have to say that while I wasn’t particularly entertained by the third movie... I was impressed by a few things. First up was the plotting which started off in the space-race of the sixties which turned out to be a response to discovering footage of an Autobot ship which had crashed on the darkside of the moon. It then went on to show us what “really” happened when Neil Armstrong and co went to check out the crashed ship. It then catches up to present day and we are back with Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky character and we meet his new girlfriend... with barely a reference to what happened to the Megan Fox character from the first two films (Hitler insults and dumb Lohan-like publicity aside... they should have stayed with the continuity and kept her in the movie).

After this, though, as the plot about the resurrection of the Einstein of the Autobot world in the form of a character called Sentinel Prime continued on... I was getting more and more impressed about the actors and celebrities appearing in this movie, often for large chunks of screen time.

John Malkovich as the bizarre managing director of a company where Sam gets a job, for example, is an amazing thing to watch. And then we had Dutch, played by Firefly/Serenity’s Alan Tudyk and Frances McCormand as a CIA (or is it FBI?) director ... not too mention Mr. Buzz Aldrin playing himself (in a small cameo really) and looking quite chipper. And to really top things off you had the voice of Leonard Nimoy playing Sentinel Prime... and there were some very blatant Star Trek references to be found in his lines (The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few) and a fair few little Star Trek moments scattered throughout the movie as it happens. Now I won’t give away too much about Sentinel Prime’s character here (although if you’re a Star Trek fan I might mention that perhaps he should have had a beard... if you know what I mean) but I do have to say... for someone who is supposed to be, as I said earlier, the "Einstein of the Autobot World"... well I don’t remember Einstein punching and kicking people and wielding big hot-metal swords when he wanted to push a point about his brand new spanking Theory of Relativity... and that’s all I’m saying about that particular character right there.

The acting in this movie is all solid (as I would expect from the very professional cast and crew assembled to make this movie) but it was with some of the returning characters from the first movie with whom I was mostly disappointed... and then, in terms of the scripting of them, not their performances. Josh Duhamel, for example, had very little to do in this movie and he’s almost entirely absent in terms of screen presence here until the second half of the final “Explosions R Us” third act set piece of the movie. John Turturro was also badly scripted in this one and in some ways he was very much treated as an add-on (we gotta get him in because he was so good in the first two movies) to the rest of the cast... most of his scenes focussing on his personal assistant Dutch. This is a great shame because Turturro kinda stole his scenes in the first movie and had pretty much the only funny lines in the second movie. A real waste of this actor this time around but... let’s be fair... I’d be moaning even more if he didn’t turn up in it at all.

This movie was pretty much an okay piece of popcorn fodder which, I think I would be reporting in a far better light if, unlike Orange Monkey, I didn’t have the fantastic first movie to compare it to. The action is spectacular and doesn’t feel too truncated as it did in the second movie... seriously people, that "Optimus Prime is back from the dead" one-on-one fight at the end of the second one needed to be way longer than the minute or two it ended up being. Such an anti-climax to something that almost the entire running time of the movie had been building up to.

Similarly with Jablonsky’s third score for the series... nice enough and not the disaster that underscored the second movie... just nowhere near as good as the first. He did remember to write in some riffs from the first and revisit the leitmotif he had established in the original... but the main melodies did seem a little delayed or slowed down and lacked the emotional punch of that initial work of musical genius. It may, however, play a lot better as a stand alone listen if the studio decide not to delay or cancel the score release CD scheduled (and rescheduled) for later on in the year. I’ll give it a go anyway.

All this added up to a not too terrible time at the cinema... and certainly not as disappointing as the last time around with the franchise. Orange Monkey actually seemed to have enjoyed it a lot more than me... which holds up to my theory that if you don’t have the better movie to compare it to, Transformers: Dark of the Moon can be a pulse-pounding thrill ride of a cinema outing. I’ve urged her to seek out the first movie if she really wants to see a well made piece of hokum.

And that’s about it for this one. If you loved the first movie and was let down as much as I was by the sequel... and are planning to see this one too... you won’t come out of the cinema feeling as angry as last time. On the other hand... if you didn’t get anything out of the first one... this movie has “Stay Away... Move Along... Nothing to see here” written on it’s armour-plated, metalmorphosising forehead. You have been warned!